For the last few weeks, I’ve been debating about whether to write this post. “Don’t tell them,” my little voice kept saying. “They won’t respect you anymore.”

Ugh. But I promised I’d be honest about the ups and downs of my business, and I’ve hit a new low:

I’m trying to buy blog love.

There. I said it. It’s true. I’ve been trying to beef up my blog statistics a number of unscrupulous ways. My ultimate goal with this blog is to use it for a springboard for a book about starting a copywriting business, and I want to be able to walk into an agent’s office with incredible stats of how many hits I get a day and how many people subscribe to my feed. All that good stuff.

The truth is my traffic took a blow very early on that I’ve never recovered from. When I had a free blog on Wordpress, I was regularly featured on the front page of their site. That could drive hundreds of people (or at least dozens) an hour to my blog, and many of them stayed around in those days. But Wordpress kicked me off for being a commercial site, so I switched to TypePad. And they sucked, so I came back to Wordpress as a self-hosted site.

I don’t get any more love from Wordpress, so I’ve been trying to generate traffic different ways. The BEST way to generate quality traffic, in my humble opinion, is to visit quality blogs and comment on quality posts and earn your reputation the hard way — by working for it. But [excuses, excuses], I no longer make time to read blogs.

Here’s the shameful list of the dishonest methods I’ve tried.

  1. Craigslist posts — occasionally I post a free link to a popular post on CL. I usually get 1-10-20 hits.
  2. backpage.com posts — backpage is kind of like CL, but you can pay to be a sponsor and to automatically repost your ad. I’ve spent perhaps $200 since December playing around with this. Sometimes I get 7 or 8 hits a day, but they don’t seem to stick around.
  3. Self-posting on StumbleUpon and Digg – UGH! StumbleUpon is on to me. I am mortified. I can no longer “nominate” one of my posts to be a Stumble. Which is such a shame because a couple of my posts on Stumble received HUGE traffic. I can put my post onto Digg, but I haven’t been able to get the wildfire started on that site.
  4. Begging friends and family — This one has become a little more shameful than handing out religious literature at a mall. I keep sending notes to my sister and my boyfriend and my dad and others saying, “Please Stumble me! If you like something, please mark it!” But mostly I get silence from these entreaties. My sister tried it a couple of times. My dad grumbled that he lost the link. D.J. and I haven’t talked about it.
  5. Hiring a company on Elance – Bottom of the barrel, this one. I found a company that helps you create incoming links to your site, and I hired them to create 200 links. I’m so embarrassed at my evil deception! They’d go to forums like this and post a false question then a false answer by someone else in a few days. Now when you do a search for the name of my blog, probably half a dozen of these hoaxes appear, and it’s obvious that I’ve seeded the web with my blatant advertisements. They were supposed to do this gradually over the course of a month, but I had to stop them half way through. I couldn’t look at myself in the morning.
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